Читать книгу Catholicism For Dummies - Rev. Kenneth Brighenti - Страница 74

The last verse of the Gospel According to John (21:25) says, “There are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” The Bible is silent in some areas. Was Jesus ever married? Did He have a wife and children? The Bible doesn’t say either way. You could presume He was unmarried, because a wife is never mentioned. (The Bible does mention Peter’s mother-in-law being cured, but the Bible never classifies the other disciples and apostles as married or single.)

No Christian denomination or religion has ever believed that Jesus was married, even though the Bible never categorically states that He remained unmarried. The reason? Tradition. Christianity has maintained the tradition that Jesus was celibate and never married, even though the Bible at best implies it by never mentioning a wife or children.

Despite what you may read in some modern novels, Jesus and Mary Magdalene were never a couple, legally or romantically. Counterfeit Gnostic Gospels were written a few hundred years after the legitimate ones that alleged such a relationship with the intent to undermine the Church. No one ever took them seriously, and no accredited scholar today gives them any credibility.

Medieval literature is filled with stories on the Holy Grail, which was the alleged chalice Jesus used at the Last Supper. Folklore and legend imply that the Knights Templar may have found it while on Crusade, but there has never been any evidence whatsoever to establish or even suggest that the Grail symbolizes a bloodline running through European monarchies going back to the supposed offspring of Christ and Mary Magdalene. These stories are all fiction; there is no historical or biblical evidence to suggest otherwise.

Whenever the Bible is silent or ambiguous, Sacred Tradition fills in the gaps. So to Catholics, a written record in the Bible is that He was a man, His name was Jesus, and His mother was Mary, and a revealed truth of Sacred Tradition is that He never married and had no children either.